Last Dragon Standing (Heartstrikers #5)(62)

“Okay, so what’s going on?” Marci asked.

“Not what,” Raven said, hopping over to perch on her shoulder opposite Ghost, who was still a cat. “Who.”

He pointed a wing tip at the waves. Curious, Marci walked to the barrier and pressed her face against the magic, squinting through the glowing maze of Myron’s labyrinth spellwork. No matter how hard she looked, though, she couldn’t see a thing, which didn’t make sense at all. The entire point of the Heart of the World was to translate the Sea of Magic into something humans could understand. It was a lens designed to let humans see the unseeable, but Marci couldn’t see anything at all. The crystal-clear water she’d looked through last time was gone, replaced by murky tides every bit as dark and confusing as the mess outside.

“I don’t get it,” she said at last. “I can’t see a thing.”

“Neither can we,” Amelia said, crossing her arms. “That’s the problem. Remember what Raven said earlier about the Leviathan being in Algonquin’s vessel? Well, turns out he didn’t stop there. The entire Sea of Magic has been infiltrated.”

Eyes wide, Marci turned to look again, and this time, she saw it. It wasn’t the water that was dark—it was the things inside it. The once-bright ocean was filled with thick, black tangles. They stretched as far as Marci could see, bobbing with the waves and carpeting the sea floor in all directions. A few tendrils had actually crawled up to the edge of the Heart of the World’s peak. They were tiny, no thicker than fine black hairs, but the deeper ones were as thick as buildings, and there were tons of them. Possibly millions, which explained how the sea had been pushed so high. It was full.

“What are they?” she asked, voice shaking. “Tentacles?”

“More like roots,” Raven said grimly. “They started in Algonquin’s vessel, but they’ve been spreading since she gave in.”

“Is that why it’s so stormy?” Marci asked. Then her face grew pale. “He’s not attacking spirits, is he?”

“No,” Amelia said. “If he were, we’d already be screwed. Bad as this looks, though, I’ve seen no evidence that he’s eaten anything yet except Algonquin. The waves you’re seeing were actually here before Leviathan started spreading.” She grinned. “Turns out, you get a lot of sloshing when you dump a thousand years of magic in all at once.”

“That is not ‘sloshing,’” Myron snarled, stabbing his finger at the giant waves washing over his protective bubble. “That is the work of spirits, and it’s all her fault.”

He snapped his finger back to Marci, who sighed. “What are you blaming me for now?”

“If you didn’t do so many irresponsible things, that wouldn’t even be a question,” Myron snapped, marching over to the giant stone seal at the center of the mountain-turned-island, or what was left of it. The circular slab that had been the seal on a thousand years of magic was cracked right down the middle, the stone blown away as though it had been blasted apart from the inside. But even broken, it was still a huge chunk of rock, and there was more than enough left for Myron to climb on top of.

“Come,” he said, snapping his fingers at Marci. “You can’t see them from the ground due to the waves, but come up here, and you’ll see that I was always right.”

Marci had never heard a less compelling reason to do anything, but Myron was clearly not going anywhere until she complied, so she sucked it up and climbed onto the cracked seal beside him. “There,” she said, tilting her head so she wouldn’t bump it on the zenith of the protective bubble over their heads. “I’m up. Now, what am I looking for?”

Myron pointed toward the horizon. Marci followed the motion with a sigh, squinting as she tried to see what he was so worked up about. But while it was much easier to see over the waves from up here, the Heart of the World’s interpretation of the over-full Sea of Magic’s chaos was still so rough, it took far longer than it should before Marci realized that the giant breakers peaking in the distance weren’t actually waves. They were creatures. Huge, alien-looking monsters, and they were attacking each other.

Every direction Marci looked, giant things were breaching the stormy sea like killer whales, flinging themselves at each other in bloody confrontations. There were so many fights, the ocean looked like it was boiling, and those were just the battles that broke the surface. Now that she knew what to look for, Marci could see the creatures clashing below the water as well. Thousands of dark shapes silhouetted against the Leviathan’s deeper blackness, trying their best to rip each other to shreds.

“Now I see why we had such a rough entrance,” Ghost said, abandoning his fluffy white cat form to appear at her side as the faceless warrior he always turned into when things got serious. “They’re at each other’s throats.”

“They who?” Marci asked desperately.

Her spirit looked at her, his glowing eyes terrified. “Everything.”

“Everything, pah!” Myron scoffed, pointing at one particularly enormous shape on the horizon. “Those aren’t normal spirits. Those are Mortal Spirits! The magic filled them, and now they’re rising and going crazy just like everyone warned you they would!” His face turned scarlet. “We told you this would happen. I told you! But did you listen? No! You just dumped the magic out, and now everything’s going to pieces!”